"You're Just Blowing Smoke"

20/11/13 11:13

This is the second instalment in a series on media relations measurement.

To help shed some light on what the state-of-the-art in media relations measurement should be, I thought I’d turn to Wilma Mathews, ABC, a long-time colleague and friend, and author of Media Relations: A Practical Guide for Communicators. Wilma has been practicing media relations for … well, let’s just say quite a few years.

When it comes to media relations evaluation and measurement, Wilma says our industry is certainly better off than it was even five or ten years ago. For many years, media relations practitioners relied on the simplistic output measures of counting clips and adding up circulation.

From there, the process evolved into impressions which, from her perspective, means pretty much the same thing as circulation and viewing audience. Next, the advertising value equivalency (AVE) was born, which she points out is a term that’s not even listed in theDictionary of Public Relations Measurement and Research.

“But over the years, as PR people, agencies and companies have gotten a little savvier, they’ve said that what we’re asking you as media people to do is sell a product, get people to come to an event, change their minds or vote for someone,” Wilma explains. “In short, we’re asking you to change behaviour of a certain audience. And that’s a little harder to do than counting clips.”

She believes the AVE was adopted as a matter of convenience (and I suspect she would say something similar about Media Relations Rating Points). It was a simple way to state some perceived value of media relations to management groups. But to her the AVE is a completely abstract number that has no correlation to any activity because advertising and media relations simply cannot be compared.

“You control everything about advertising,” she explains. “You control nothing about the editorial side of the media. But (the AVE) was a way to say to clients ‘if you had purchased advertising, it would have cost you X amount of dollars, and we prevented you from having to do that.’ And it sounded good at the outset.”

She makes a clear distinction between evaluation and measurement in media relations. “You can evaluate your media relations work and still not measure whether or not it worked,” she explains. “In other words, if a media relations practitioner wanted a positive story on the front page of the business section with a quote from their CEO — and they wanted it to appear before the product launch — if they got all of that it says their process worked. It says nothing about whether that helped sales.”

To her, measurement is the end outcome — from an attitudinal or behavioural perspective. Did people buy the product? Did they vote the way you wanted? Did they form an opinion or change their minds?

“If that didn’t happen and all you’ve got to show for it is advertising value equivalents or impressions,” she points out, “you’re just blowing smoke.”